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In this blog post we will show you how to use Power Query in Excel to import data from LinkedIn and gain amazing competitive analysis insights based on company search. To get your attention right at the start, we will conduct this tutorial and analyze a domain that we all know so well and love – Power Pivot. We will analyze companies who specialize in Power Pivot.

We will show you step by step how to utilize Power Query to extract information from LinkedIn including company size, founding year, location, specialties, and more.

Build your own customized Competitive Analysis Dashboard

When we are done, you can download the workbook, read below how to get LinkedIn access token in this tutorial (Step 1-6), and start using the workbook as your dashboard for competitive analysis. You can use its parameterized queries to search for companies in any domain, refresh the workbook and get a tailor-made dashboard for the competitive posture of your interest.

Before we start, here are few screenshots of what you can get at the end.

Screenshot below shows the world distribution of the 70 companies who specialize in PowerPivot (Created with Power Query and Power Map).

Next screenshot shows the distribution of companies by founding year. It’s interesting to see a gradual incline of younger companies who specialize in PowerPivot from 2009 to 2013, and to see a decline in 2014. It seems that last year fewer companies were founded with PowerPivot as a specialty.

Next screenshot shows company distribution by Specialty. You can see the most common specialties for companies who specialize in PowerPivot (e.g. Business Intelligence, SQL Server and Excel).